Science, Technology and Medicine

The building of the Panama Canal, from France's failed attempt to US completion.

Electrification in the US, Britain and Germany, 1880 to 1930, as a technical system.

How the bomb was built, from the discovery of atomic energy to Hiroshima.

How Xerox PARC built the first personal computer and laser printer, and lost them.

How inventions of 1867 to 1914, from electricity to cars, made the modern world.

A biography of cancer, by a physician and oncologist.

The gene from Mendel and Darwin to genome editing, beside a family's mental illness.

How the Copernican revolution unfolded, as a turning point in scientific thought.

The history of molecular biology from the 1930s to the 1970s, told by its makers.

How plague, cholera, malaria and smallpox shaped history.

Edison's life drawn from his papers, unsparing about his finances.

Three generations of hackers, from MIT's AI Lab to the Homebrew club and game makers.

How Kilby and Noyce each invented the integrated circuit in 1958 and 1959.

How the Macintosh was made and launched in 1984.

How Licklider and Pentagon-funded engineers built the network behind the internet.

How the Bell Labs team of Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain invented the transistor.

The reporting history of Linux and the businesses built around it.

Every US information industry moved from an open era to control by one firm.

How Edison's electric light changed American life and marked a new age.

Computing as a run of collaborations, from Ada Lovelace and Babbage to Google.

How the mp3, a CD-factory leaker and pirate websites broke the music business.

From a Dayton bicycle shop to the first powered flights and the 1908 demonstrations.

The 1986 Chernobyl disaster, and the secrecy and myth that hid what happened.

Innovation is gradual, collective and bottom-up, not the work of lone inventors.

How chips became the key to economic and military power, made in a few chokepoints.

The founding of AI research, from interviews with McCarthy, Minsky and others.

How Rockefeller philanthropy reshaped American medicine.

The idea of personal computing and the people who pursued it, up to PARC.

Portraits of the scientists, engineers and founders behind new technology.

How electricity spread through everyday American life and commerce.

AI research from Dartmouth in 1956 to the funding cuts, told by the field's leaders.

How evidence and probability were reasoned about before formal statistics

Video games from their pre-electronic origins to the industry of 2001.

The current war: Edison against Westinghouse and Tesla.

Chester Carlson and xerography, the invention that funded PARC.

Video games from Atari and cartridge consoles to Nintendo and the global industry.

Edison's laboratory as a business, with pictures from his archive.

Nuclear accidents, what went wrong in each, and what each taught about the atom.

The Ansari X Prize and the start of commercial human spaceflight.

Oral history; Thiel and the PayPal cohort speak in their own words.

How the concept of number evolved from prehistoric times to the twentieth century.

The chief engineer on designing, building, testing and flying the lunar module.

Boulton, Watt, Wedgwood, Erasmus Darwin and the Midlands friends who experimented.

The 1918 flu: how it spread from a Kansas army camp and killed up to 100 million.

The American fear of polio and the race for a cure, from the March of Dimes to Salk.

The 1918 Spanish flu, which killed 50 to 100 million, through history and science.

Institutional history of interconnection and who controls it.

How Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga built quantum electrodynamics.

The coming of the machine age in Britain, 1660 to 1886, through eyewitness writings.